


Godforsaken

by siegeofangels



Category: Macdonald Hall - Gordon Korman, Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-02-14
Updated: 2008-01-25
Packaged: 2017-10-18 06:31:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/186003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/siegeofangels/pseuds/siegeofangels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I says to myself, "Self, what would be nice is a little story about Rodney and his nephew Bruno." And then I shot John Sheppard in the ass and he took over the story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

"Six to eight weeks, as far as I can tell," Carson tells him, and John can only close his eyes and shake his head in response. The nerve agent--whatever the hell they'd tipped the arrow with--makes him fuzzy and a little slow; he's still got all of his motor functions, but they're just a little behind, and thinking too much makes him tired.

Which makes him absolutely no good on away missions, or really anything else for a month and a half.

The first week he wanders around Atlantis like a ghost, trying to keep his body and mind a little active (doctor's orders--as long as he walks and plays with his Rubik's Cube Carson won't sic a nurse on him). It's frustrating for him, though, and clearly unnerving for his subordinates to see the Colonel frowning slowly, too clean, no sidearm or fresh wounds.

They save the arrowhead for him; he's been shot before, but never with anything that had been hand-crafted. Kind of makes him feel special. He spends more time than he should sitting cross-legged on his bed, rubbing his fingers across the glassy white stone point.

Teyla comes to visit him and talk; she makes him tell her story after story, makes him force the words and sentences to line up in his head. She asks about myths and fairytales; he talks for a while and then begins to falter, mixing them up and saying, "Ah, hell, I don't care. There was a prince and he kissed her. The end."

The next day she asks him about his family, about the friends he left behind: things too important for him to misrepresent to her, and he struggles but slowly tells her the stories of the people who made him. He doesn't usually talk about them, but it's Teyla. She'll keep them safe.

A couple more days and Elizabeth gently suggests that he take a vacation, return to Earth on the _Daedalus_. "Besides," she says. "It'll be Christmas."

John wonders if it's the easy way out for her or for him. He really wouldn't be able to bear fading away in Atlantis, and he wonders how being put out to pasture compares to being taken behind the shed and shot.

Elizabeth puts a hand on his shoulder, and he realizes he's spoken aloud.

"Just kidding," he says. Of course he was kidding. There are no sheds in Atlantis.

To his surprise (and to the complete lack of surprise of every other person in the city), Rodney gets on the _Daedalus_ with him, and pesters him for the next two weeks with word puzzles and math and endless verbal baiting. Strangely enough, the baiting works: there's only so many times you can say "Fuck off, McKay," and anyway Rodney seems to take that phrase as a sign of victory. John gets very good at drawling insults, stretching the words long enough that he just sounds arrogant instead of slow.

He manages the physical aspects on his own: you couldn't trust a gun in his hand right now, but he used to run miles every morning, and getting up to walk (and later, gingerly jog) the hallways doesn't take much less discipline. He does push-ups--too few--and imagines the poison sweating out of his body, washing away in the shower.

Earth is louder than he remembers. It _buzzes_ , and it smells funny, and he sees about six different doctors at the SGC before he's allowed to go with the same instructions that Carson gave him: just give it time, keep exercising, keep doing crossword puzzles.

Duh.

***

About ten percent of the people at the airport, John estimates, are wearing Santa hats.

"Kinda weird," he says. "Figured we'd be spending Christmas somewhere . . . else. Sleeping outside, you know." He's not exactly sure when he agreed to come to Canada with Rodney to spend Christmas with his sister and nephew. He thinks it was at the SGC, after being cornered by xenoanthropologists and very, very crisp USAF uniforms for two days; by the time Rodney poked his head into John's room and said, _Our plane leaves at eleven,_ John was so eager to get the hell out of there he didn't even argue with Rodney's presumption.

"Yes, well," Rodney says. "After being held at gunpoint on my birthday, I just couldn't wait for what Christmas had in store. At least we're not in some godforsaken--" he trails off and they stare out the window.

Winnipeg stares back, gray and sullen.

"Oh, fine," Rodney says. "Godforsaken. But at least my sister will have hot chocolate."

***

John hangs on for dear life as Rodney takes to the road; Rodney's driving is like some bizarre microcosm of his life, all arm gestures, steering with his knees, a flurry of constant motion and sound.

"We used to come here on vacations, with the--you know, sometimes I prefer the people who are actively working toward my death over these color-blind octogenarians who going to kill me through their own oblivious incomptetence--where is she going? Is that her turn signal? It's not even blinking in rhythm--that can't be Jeannie's house and do you feel the brakes on this thing? It's like braking with cornbread--" and he mercifully stops and John lurches out of the car and manages to salvage some dignity standing on the gravel, clutching the car like he's just pausing to look at the house.

"You're not allowed to drive anymore," he tells Rodney.

Rodney's sister is petite and curvy, light brown hair in a soccer mom cut, and she tells John to call her Jean. There's a politeness there that's kind of icy (ha, he thinks. Canada), and he's not sure if it's because of him invading her house or something else.

But then she and Rodney fall into rapid sibling speech, a mile a minute in a sort of shorthand; John can't quite keep up and his headache's coming back. "I'm sorry," he says, " . . . just close my eyes for a little while?"

"Of course," Jeannie says, "But my son will be getting home soon," and John sinks gratefully into the sofa in the darkened living room and dozes while house-sounds come alive around him: Rodney and Jeannie moving around each other in the kitchen, spoons clinking on bowls and the beeping of the microwave. The Christmas tree is in the corner of the room and the clean sharp pine scent fills the room.

He's just half-asleep when Jeannie's son opens the front door and bounds into the living room, dropping a duffel bag on the floor. John jerks awake and says, "Nnrgh," and he hates his body, hates the poison, because a month ago he would have been on his feet in a second.

"Mom, where's your hippie book?" Bruno yells.

There's a hushed scolding from the kitchen telling him to be quiet, and Bruno spins around to see John.

John manages to sit up. "Hippie book?" he says.

"Yeah," the kid says with a horrifyingly Rodney-like forehead furrow. "For inspiration, we're having protests."

"Sticking it to the Man," John says, nodding.

"Exactly," Bruno says. "There's this completely unreasonable policy they started," and he launches into a foaming diatribe about oppression and a fish and someone with a shotgun, and when he stops for breath Jeannie pokes her head around the door and says, "Dinner."

As John gets up without any dizziness whatsoever--hooray for small victories--Bruno says, "So, who were you again?"

"Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard, United States Air Force," John says, and because he can't resist baiting that face, "I'm the Man."

Dinner is good, simple food, tastes he'd missed and those he hadn't realized he'd missed. (Root beer. Honest-to-God root beer.) Rodney's eating like he's never going to see broccoli again. It's possible, John thinks.

Rodney and Jeannie get into a fight over dessert that devolves into what John figures must be an old, old argument for them: she doesn't approve of Rodney's working for the military, particularly the US military.

 _Hi,_ he feels like saying. _Still sitting right here._ He gets up instead, carrying his coffee cup and demolished pie to the sink.

Bruno follows him and turns the water on, rinsing off their plates.

"So," John says, searching desperately for a neutral topic, "what were you saying about school?"

Apparently, Bruno goes to a boarding school in Ontario, just got home for Christmas break today, and is considering desparate measures against the new policy Macdonald Hall has put into place regarding student government.

"I mean," Bruno says, "it's a big step up from not having a student council at all, but appointed by the faculty instead of elected? That's a joke!"

There's a shout from the dining room and Rodney comes into the kitchen, the door swinging back and forth behind him. "So," he says brightly. "This is extra fun. Almost as much as being shot at. What are we discussing in here?"

"The Hall," Bruno says. "Faculty-appointed student government."

"Not you?"

"My roommate. What'd you say to Mom?"

"She'll get over it," Rodney says. "She knows I'm right, it'll just take her a minute."

"What's wrong with your roommate?" John asks.

Bruno looks confused. "Nothing."

"Student union?" Rodney suggests.

"We'd need a faculty advisor. There was an, um, an incident a couple of years ago."

Bruno has unremarkable brown hair and medium build, Rodney's chin and Jeannie's brown eyes, his brain clicking like machinery: like how John imagines Rodney was at seventeen.

(Ronon told John once that he'd never really liked the name Dex, so he didn't mind so much that he'd never have an heir. Apparently Satedan lineage passed down the female line; Ronon's sisters' children would have been his heirs if the Wraith hadn't come. It seems like a good way to do things, John thinks. He's not planning on ever having children.)

John realizes his mind is wandering, and he nods toward the door. "I'm going to go sit for a minute."

Jeannie's still sitting in the dining room, tapping her thumb on the table and looking like she would very much like a cigarette, and they sit in silence for a moment, staring at the table before she speaks. "I know he said it's classified," she says. "I just . . . I need to know my baby brother's not making weapons that are going to annihilate the human race."

"He's not," John says truthfully.

"What does he do?" Jeannie says.

John thinks about poison arrows in the ass, and how Rodney piloted the jumper back; about shields and power overloads and how Jeannie's baby brother wears a sidearm now.

"He saves our lives a lot," he tells her.

The kitchen door bursts open again, and Rodney follows Bruno out. "You're a McKay, even if your name's Walton," Rodney says, finger stabbing the air. "If you play stupid, I won't believe you."

"I'm not playing stupid. I told you we tried that, okay?" Bruno says, plopping down at the table with a soda. "Apparently there's a rule against it."

Realization dawns on Rodney's face. "Forty-seven-a," he says, and then, smug, "I'm the reason _for_ forty-seven-a."

"So how do we get around it?"

"You don't. MacDonald Hall rules are like laws of physics. You break them, you die. Or get expelled, which is probably the same thing for you."

"You break the laws of physics all the time," John protests.

Rodney points at him. "I rewrite them. That's different."

"Rewrite them," Bruno says. "Oh, my God," and launches into another stream of plans and ideas and what John thinks might be a manifesto.

The kid stops for breath and John says, alarmed, "You were born in Canada, right?" He wonders what would happen if there was ever a brain like Rodney's in the White House, turned toward furthering society instead of science. It's a terrifying idea.

"Yeah, of course," Bruno says, puzzled. "Why?"

"No reason," John tells him, and grins a little to himself.

Before long John realizes that he's supposed to have another walk before he goes to bed (Rodney makes inappropriate puppy jokes, and John threatens to find a leash just so he can strangle Rodney with it), so he and Rodney bundle up and venture outside, their boots squeaking on the hard snow as the lights that outline the houses and trees twinkle and blur.

 _Crunch, crunch._ Canada is huge and stark around them, flat in every direction.

"Hey, how many Christmas lights do you think we'd need to decorate Atlantis?" Rodney says, his breath white in the glow of the streetlights. He looks happy, cheeks red and hat bobble bobbling as they walk.

John's suddenly glad of Jeannie and Bruno: it's unlikely that Rodney will have any children, not on Atlantis, and it's good to think that there will be someone running around and being brilliant and pissing people off when they're gone. He thinks about Bruno in Atlantis, wearing red.

"A hundred and ten miles?" John imagines running lights along the piers, the spires of his city lit up in celebration, in memorial; every peak outlined in a million white lights for Pegasus souls when the Wraith are finally gone and there's no hiding anymore. "I'll start stockpiling them," he says. "It'll be a hell of a party."


	2. Godforsaken II: Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The return home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes: All of the good parts are due to cincodemaygirl's beta. All of the bad parts are where I didn't listen to her. This has been sitting on my computer untouched for, I swear, a year and a half, and I just need to let it go.

Winnipeg in winter isn't quite Antarctica, but it's still damn cold--sometimes windy enough to whisk John's breath away, sometimes bright and brittle and unmoving. John jogs in the morning, as the sun is just rising, when the air curls freezing tendrils into his lungs and the only thing on his mind is the thin clear perfect air in his throat.

Back inside, it's push-ups (twice as many as he could do on the _Daedalus_ ), then a few sit-ups that still give him vertigo, and a wonderful warm shower with one stray spray that gets him in the eye.

He plays prime/not prime with Rodney and Risk with Bruno ("It's your own fault for playing with someone who's taken actual military strategy classes," Rodney says when Bruno loses). There's a minor shouting match one evening over a game of Scrabble and whether it should be _favor_ or _favour_ , and while they're squabbling Jeannie uses her last seven tiles to spell IMBECILE, landing on the triple word score and silencing them both.

Bruno grins and tacks an S onto the end.

***

Christmas is _nice_ , there's no other word for it. They sit on the floor around the Christmas tree, eating crumb cake and opening presents.

Bruno's dad sent him hockey equipment, a bulky, ill-wrapped mass in the corner, and Jeannie gives Bruno new skates. The adults' presents are all food--tradition, Rodney said in the car, and John was only too happy to get out of Doctor McKay's Wild Ride and walk around the gourmet grocery store tossing boxes of hideously expensive chocolates and bottles of ice wine into their cart.

"We should get Elizabeth something," John said, and that was another hour spent picking out delicate cookies and--"You think Ronon _wouldn't_ enjoy ten pounds of potatoes?" Rodney said.

John, against his better judgment, gives Rodney a pound of chocolate-covered coffee beans, and receives in his turn some sort of ugly fruit that squirts John in the eye when he tries to open it.

Rodney gives Bruno a laptop and then monopolizes it for the afternoon, installing software and tuning it like a car until it does things that John's sure aren't in the manual.

John plays poker with Bruno while Rodney's typing and muttering, "Okay, if I just create a relay here . . . . " They talk about civil disobedience and revolutions, and Jeannie cuts in every so often to say things like, "Bruno, if you fill your school swimming pool with tea I'm disowning you."

It's the kind of Christmas John never had; the house is bright and warm and sparkling, and John's brain feels clearer than it has in a while. He and Rodney and Bruno, in a terribly Disney-movie moment, go out into the backyard and throw a football around until they get too cold to really catch properly, and the ball ricochets off Rodney's outstretched mittens and bonks him in the face. Which is okay, too, because then they get to go back inside to the wonderful smell of oatmeal cookies and hot chocolate and convince Rodney that his nose isn't really broken.

***

A couple of days after Christmas, Jeannie makes soup out of what's left of the turkey.

John's sitting at the kitchen table with a crossword when she tells him to make himself useful and plunks a knife and some vegetables down in front of him. He looks up, surprised. He hasn't touched anything sharper than a pencil in a month.

"Small enough to fit on a spoon," she says.

"What? He's not--" Rodney starts to say, and Jeannie cuts him off, gesturing with an enormous wooden spoon.

"If he can do crossword puzzles and make snowballs," she says, and John hides a grin, because she totally wasn't supposed to see the snowball fight, "he has enough fine motor skills to chop celery without severing an artery."

John knows that usually he'd be bristling at other people presuming to tell him what he could and couldn't do with a four-inch knife, but this isn't a sterile white infirmary and his hands did pretty much stop shaking a day or two ago. So he just smirks at Rodney-- _she likes me best!_ \--and slices very carefully.

***

So it turns out that Jeannie's an elementary school teacher, and her term starts before Bruno's. Bruno usually takes the train back to school, but Rodney's not going to pass up an opportunity to terrorize John with his driving.

"Sure, we can drive him," Rodney says. "Nothing but time."

John tries not to think about how they have nothing but time here on Earth, when life on Atlantis always seems to go at double-speed. He wonders what's happening back in the Pegasus galaxy, if he'd get any word from the SGC if something terrible went down.

"I'm going for a run," John tells Rodney the next morning. "Come on, you might even be able to keep up."

***

Rodney on the open road is slightly less terrifying than Rodney driving in the city, so John can relax enough to talk to Bruno, who tells him how the Hall relieved themselves of a teacher a couple of years ago.

"Piece of cake," Bruno says. "My plans never fail. Okay, except for that time they thought we were terrorists, but that worked out okay in the end, so who cares?"

John is torn between being very, very afraid of Bruno, and trying to recruit him. He settles for telling edited stories of Atlantis.

***

"Oh, my God, _again_?" Rodney whines, and moves into the turn lane for the rest stop, decelerating hard.

"I just need to stretch my legs," John says. "Five minutes."

"Every time you get out for five minutes it costs us ten, you realize that, right?" Rodney pulls with his customary flair into a parking space next to a salt-stained Ford Taurus.

"I'm sorry, Rodney," John says with bright false sincerity, and gets out of the car, leaving the door open as long as possible out of spite. "I certainly didn't mean to inconvenience you by getting shot in the ass with a poison arrow."

The rest stop is glittering with ice, and if he slips and breaks something he'll never hear the end of it, so John doesn't venture far, taking careful steps. The cold air feels good after hours in a hot car with McKay, who has the heat cranked up high. Bruno fell asleep in the backseat a little while ago, snoring like Rodney does when they're offworld.

***

"Scrimmage?"

"Still alive. Can you believe it? We get held up by her and her shotgun at least every couple of months."

"Oh, right, but usually you can duck into the--"

"No, she's got bionic vision or something. And I don't want to--"

"Die in the woods! Couple of years?"

"Soon, yeah."

John can tell they're getting closer because of the way Bruno starts to almost bounce in his seat.

John knows how he feels. They pass what he knows are lakes and rivers, but he still feels landlocked--bound by solid earth around him and the too-low roof above him. The world should be flat and wide, buildings should soar and glitter. John's preferred method of transportation is beautiful dull gunmetal gray and seats a dozen, and John sits on the left unless he's lying down.

"Can I--" John starts, and Rodney cuts him off, not unkindly, with, "No," just like the six million other times John asked to drive.

John huffs softly and goes back to watching out the window for the rest stop signs. A soft snore comes from the backseat and Rodney says quietly, "Look, you'll be back flying before you know it. And you can do barrel rolls until I puke."

***

" _Actually_ a poison arrow?"

"Yup," John says. He fishes it out of his pocket and hands it to Bruno.

"You brought it--! What am I saying, of _course_ you brought that through Customs," Rodney says. "What if they'd stopped you?"

John frowns. "It's not that sharp." It wasn't, really, and didn't go all that deep. Just enough that he feels twinges sometimes.

"Cool," Bruno says, and hands it back.

John considers it, the short white stone point, flared at the bottom like a fish tail. "Yeah, it is, isn't it?"

"I didn't even know you'd kept it," Rodney says, and reaches over to grab it from John's fingers, holding it up at the top of the steering wheel to look at while he drives.

"Yeah," John says again. "I figured, what the hell."

***

They swing around a curve and there's a sharp intake of breath from Rodney, a swelling-with-pride deep breath from Bruno as the school comes into sight. John knows the sound: he hears it every time he flies back from the mainland and his city appears on the edge of the horizon.

"So," John says casually. "There it is."

"Yeah," Bruno says, proud. "That's the Hall."

***

They all haul Bruno's stuff to his dorm room, and try to figure out where the hockey pads go while they say hi to Bruno's roommate--Boots, né Melvin P. O'Neal, and wow, John doesn't blame the kid, because he's always been grateful to just be John.

"I feel like I know you already," John jokes as he shakes Boots' hand, and Boots just grins.

It _was_ a lot of stories about Boots, but sometime around the twentieth story John realized that all of his own best stories involve Rodney, so.

Almost immediately Bruno is outlining his Plan. The Plan, and John knows it deserves the capital letters, was scribbled in Bruno's notebook and typed on Bruno's laptop and--most importantly--lives in all its glory in Bruno's head, the product of long talks about strategy with John and brilliance from Rodney and all of Bruno's teenaged passion, ready and waiting to be implemented upon, John thinks, the probably-not-unsuspecting denizens of Macdonald Hall.

John kind of wishes he could be there to see what happens.

A skinny kid with huge birth-control glasses appears in the doorway, and Bruno breaks his monologue mid-finger-snap-point and says, "Hey, Elmer."

"Hello, Bruno, Melvin; I trust your midwinter holidays were satisfactory?" Elmer looks over and notices John and Rodney for the first time--actually, he only has eyes for Rodney. "Oh, my God," the kid says, "Rodney McKay," and promptly keels over in a dead faint.

A normal human being would be embarrassed by this, but it's Rodney, and therefore normal does not apply.

Rodney peers down at him, smug. "Oh, that takes me back. As long as he's breathing he'll be fine."

"This happen often?" John says dryly.

"Well, not as often as it used to, sadly, but no, it's not unheard of."

***

John gets the grand tour, crunching over the salted sidewalks with Rodney and Bruno and Boots and, orbiting Rodney like a satellite, Elmer.

It's . . . well, Macdonald Hall is normal. John had somehow expected it to be larger than life, but the modest buildings hugging the ground and the cracker-box dormitories all spell _school_ to him, just a regular place save for the people in it.

Rodney points out his old dorm room and where he hid the green-eyed robot; Bruno and Boots walk him past the headmaster's office where they'd each been held _totally unfairly_ for detention a record number of times.

They're walking down a hallway of classrooms when they come on a wall covered in plaques and Rodney's eyes light up and he gets a slightly shy smile on his face. John hadn't thought Rodney could _do_ shy, but the place-memory must be getting to him, because it's like Rodney's twelve again and this is his first big moment, pride just beginning to bubble up.

Rodney's got a good half-dozen little brass rectangles up there, yearly science awards with his name engraved on them. There are a couple of larger ones, too, big national-award plates with RODNEY MCKAY in huge letters.

There's also a picture. John says, "Aw. Look at you," and Rodney says indignantly, "It was the Eighties."

John grins, and Rodney smiles back sweetly and dope-slaps the back of John's head.

***

"I'd tell you to stay out of trouble," Rodney says, "but it would probably be useless in the short term and counterproductive in the long term, so I'll simply say good luck." He hugs Bruno, a little stiffly.

"Good luck with the Plan," John says. He wants to say, the Hall's lucky to have you the way we're lucky to have your uncle. He settles for shaking Bruno's hand.

"Good luck with the . . . not getting shot again," says Bruno.

"You know, I've been telling him that for years, and does he listen?" Rodney says.

As they're heading for the car, Elmer comes running after them like it's the last scene in a Sandra Bullock movie and thrusts a scientific journal and a pen at Rodney.

He makes incoherent squeaking noises, and Rodney takes the pen and opens the journal to the article inside that bears his name.

Rodney signs it REACH FOR THE M-CLASS SUPERGIANTS, and Elmer receives it back like he's holding a holy relic.

As the kid walks away, barely touching the ground, John slips on his sunglasses against the glare of the snow and says, "We should probably go before he offers you a kidney or something."

"Bite me, Colonel," Rodney says, and they get into the car and head for home.

***

It takes a couple of days of wheedling, but eventually enough people are sick enough of John and Rodney to let them get on the Daedalus when it next leaves. Either that or John's better than he thought at convincing people that he really is ready to return to Atlantis, even if not to active duty right away.

John wins fourteen Snickers bars from Rodney, target shooting. As they leave the armory, Rodney points out that that's still better than he usually does against John, and ponders at length whether he's gotten so much better or if it's John's "weakened mental and physical state."

John hits him in the arm as they reach the elevator. "Muscle spasm," he says innocently. "Damn this neurotoxin."

He meets with the base doctors and physical therapists and this one guy who pastes electrodes all over John's head and makes him do logic puzzles. At the end of it they pronounce him good, or good enough. Carson will still have to clear him for active duty when he gets back, and knowing Carson, Heightmeyer will get to have a crack at him too, but that's fine, that's perfect, that's better than Earth.

***

Here they are, they're here, they're back to Atlantis, the ocean is glittering below them and somewhere down there is John's city hidden in a bubble.

"Colonel," Hermiod says. "We are ready to beam you down."

John starts, and moves away from where he'd been gaping out the window like a little boy at the airport to the middle of the room, joining Rodney, who's holding a touchpad and looking as excited to be back as John feels. He takes a deep breath.

Rodney gives the signal to Hermiod, but before anything happens, John says, "Rodney," and when he looks over: "Thanks," John says, simply.

Rodney nods at him and smiles, the sincere smile that he hardly ever lets show, and it's the last thing John sees before the ship dissolves around him and reforms as the sweeping blues and green-grays of the gate room.

And finally, he's back, feeling better than he has since before the arrow, and he can feel Atlantis rush up to meet him, excitement and love, welcoming him with open arms.

Elizabeth comes to them, bright and vibrant like a kite in the sky. "Colonel Sheppard, Doctor McKay," she says, her eyes sparkling. "Welcome home."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [on LiveJournal](http://siegeofangels.livejournal.com/344963.html).


	3. Godforsaken III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The three lines written of Godforsaken III.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There was going to be a Part III, where they're back on Atlantis and there's this whole subplot with a pregnant marine. Only, being completely uninterested in writing that story, please enjoy the _three lines_ I did write. Almost two years ago.

John wanted to raise the squalling baby to the sky, to scream to the Wraith _You think you are more powerful than us because you bring destruction and suffering and death. But we? **We have created life!**_

It wasn't his baby, though, so he just wiggled a finger at it and said, "Hey, there, little guy."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [on LiveJournal](http://siegeofangels.livejournal.com/374632.html).


	4. Taking Tea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Outtake from the Godforsaken-verse.

John isn't really sure how they got here.

Okay, not _neurotoxin_ not-sure, but the kind of not-sure that he's pretty sure everybody experiences when faced with Rodney McKay in his natural habitat. He's seen the blank look Elizabeth gets sometimes when Rodney's explaining something in his lab, and John's sure he looks the same, here in--again, not sure how they got here--in the sitting room of the headmaster of Rodney's high school, staring down at a plate of delicate cookies.

Mrs. Sturgeon pours the tea.

John makes the requisite small talk-- _oh, yes, lifelong Air Force, work with Dr. McKay, sadly it's all classified or I'd tell you all about it, really it's a lovely place_ \--and Rodney manages to steamroll over the conversation, gesturing with his full teacup and asking about the various new facilities (John, having been treated to Bruno Walton's Greatest Hits in the car, suspects Rodney just wants to see Sturgeon keep a straight face when he talks about the pool). It all feels so oddly familiar.

The previous headmaster, Sturgeon tells them, finished his tenure at Macdonald Hall just as Rodney was graduating.

"Oh," Rodney says. "The fireworks. Right."

John takes a sip of tea (black tea, just tea, and he doesn't really like it but let's be polite here) and nods his okay at Rodney. "Well, I can't say I never set anything on fire in high school."

"In my defense," Rodney says, and takes a sip, "it was only what I considered would be a fitting sendoff for the man," and John realizes what they're doing--they've done this a million times, sat with strangers and shared a cup. By rights the others should be here, Ronon perched on the damask couch and Teyla leaning forward and saying warmly, "This is an excellent tea--may I ask if it is grown by your people?"

John smiles and goes for the cookies, and even though he _knows_ Rodney mentioned the lemon thing, and _knows_ the headmaster's wife isn't going to try to kill Rodney, he tastes carefully and nods at Rodney and is so, so not going to ever let this go.

***

(Later, at a mostly-empty Burger King somewhere in one of Canada's prarie provinces, John unwraps his burger and picks it up and puts it down and carefully doesn't take a bite, keeping up a steady conversation, until Rodney says, "Aren't you going to--oh. _Oh_ , you _bastard_ \--"

Rodney pelts him with fries while John just laughs and laughs.

"Regained ability to _plot against me_ , let me see if that's on Carson's list," Rodney grumbles, when he's exhausted his supply of deep-fried projectiles.

John just smirks at him, and lets him steal his pie.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [on LiveJournal](http://siegeofangels.livejournal.com/277569.html).

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [on LiveJournal](http://siegeofangels.livejournal.com/194840.html).


End file.
